I have been doing a bit of an audit of my finances lately.  I always thought that such behaviour was a bit pointless with small return.  The image I had was of Which-readers spending hours comparing tarriffs on gas and electricity and changing suppliers every two months to keep getting the best offer, saving a few quid, but at the expense of a lot of time, or the infamous credit card ‘rate-tarts’ who keep moving balances between free introductory offers.

Personally I value my time at  £20 an hour, at least, so spending several evenings looking at comparitive figures to save £13 a year didn’t strike me as being a good return.  It was always in the back of my mind that I must be overpaying for some things but I never considered it was worthwhile looking into it.

What changed my mind was telling my insurance company that I had changed cars and being told it would be an extra tenner a month on the insurance.  I accepted that but resolved to find out if I could get cheaper insurance and went to Confused.com which keeps advertising on the TV.  Filling out all the information took ages, but it came back with a range of quotes, most of which were hundreds of pounds cheaper than what I am paying.  Even my current insurance company had a quote which was about half what I am actually paying them.  As soon as I get the paperwork through so I can tax the car I will be dumping them straight away.

Once I got into the groove I decided to look into my TV/phone/Internet costs. For historical reasons I have Broadband and telephone supplied by Virgin and TV supplied by Sky.  I had come to the conclusion that we do not watch enough movies and sport to make it worth keeping the Sky movie and sport channels and would have ditched them anyway, but I had also been thinking about getting Sky+ whcih would have been a tenner a month without those extra channels.

I also knew that you can get a better deal now by bundling everything together and getting it from the same supplier.  I did not fancy the Sky package – I prefer cable modems to ADSL, and it would have meant losing my blueyonder email address which a lot of people know – so I gave Virgin Media a call.

I have ended up keeping the same telephone and broadband that I had with them and adding their top-of-the-range TV package, a couple of additional boxes so the kids can get more than 4 channels in their rooms, and Virgin’s equivalent of Sky+ (V+) and the whole lot is not even £20 more than I currently pay for just phone and broadband!   Overall it is a saving of more than £40 a month and I am getting more features, while only losing stuff I wasn’t really using.

I think that Soccer AM is about the only thing I will miss.

So far that is between £60 and £70 a month saved once I get TV and car insurance changed over.  I will probably look at changing the house contents insurance at the same time and save another few quid.  Transferring my job from London to Crawley has already saved me £250 a month in travel and another £60 (possibly) in food because of using a subsidised canteen instead of London cafes. Add in the small pay rise which was involved and I am already up around £450 a month.

That is almost like getting the income from an extra part-time job!

I think I might even look at power suppliers, bank charges and interest rates after all. I am not going to spend a long time doing this sort of thing on a regular basis, but I am going to do an annual spring-clean of the regular bills from now on.

The only problem with Virgin was that they are so busy the earliest day they could manage to install the new gear was May 3rd – election day. I expect to be a bit busy that day so I put it off until the Tuesday after.

(All of these are unsolicited testimonials, and if Richard Branson decides to treat me to an expenses-paid week in Mustique as a goodwill gesture I will, of course, declare it.)